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Country Cottage Makeover — 19th Century Country Cottage — Country Living

With can-do resourcefulness, and loads of affordable finds, stylists Sacha Dunn and Edmund Levine turned a run-down 1800 cottage into the farmhouse of their dreams.

Written by Liesl Schillinger

As I walk up the flagstone path to the Dunn-Levine family’s white clapboard farmhouse, 4-year-old Max runs down the steps, takes me by the hand, and says, «Can I show you my room? We decorated it!» And off we go, on a tour led by the household’s most important design arbiter: the boy whose very existence prompted his parents to hunt down this bucolic two-bedroom refuge in upstate New York.

Three years ago, when Max was a baby, his parents, Sacha Dunn and Edmund Levine, began searching for a rural retreat from their Brooklyn apartment — a place with land, trees, and a sense of history — where they could introduce their son to the slower pace of life in the country. «Edmund and I don’t have regular nine-to-five jobs,» says Dunn of their shared freelance careers styling rooms and sets for magazines and movies. «So we were looking for more than just a weekend place. We wanted a family home where we could make the most of our flexible schedules.»

They also hoped to find something they could afford on freelancer budgets — a diamond in the rough, perhaps, that needed sprucing up. «As stylists, we’re used to coming up with creative ways to transform places that look pretty shabby in their original state,» Dunn explains. So when the two first saw this 1800 farmhouse in Columbia County, set on a couple of acres with a creek and a spring, and priced at only $120,000, they weren’t cowed by the fact that there was no kitchen, that one room had only a dirt floor, or that the interior hadn’t been changed since the 1960s.

Dunn and Levine knew they’d have to change the floor plan, put in a new kitchen, renovate the bathroom, and update the plumbing and heating systems. Still, they hoped the remaining work would involve little more than childproofing, painting, and decorating. But when Levine uncovered the floors, expecting hardwood, he discovered rotted pine, an unforeseen glitch that led the couple to install rough-cut planks — which they spaced a nail’s width apart to give the appearance of age — throughout the house. Other improvements followed soon thereafter. Levine rebuilt the staircase’s rickety banister, installed Sheetrock and windows, and replaced the ancient wood-burning stove with a smokeless model from Vermont Castings. In the end, Dunn admits, «We pretty much replaced the entire house. There’s only one ceiling beam left from the originals. It’s above the stairs — you hold on to it as you go up.»

Then came the second phase: decorating. «We worked really hard on this place, like it was a job we had to prop,» recalls Dunn, who tracked down much of the home’s furnishings from extremely affordable sources. «Almost everything we have was from a shoot or bought for practically nothing.» A gooseneck lamp in the office came from a promo shoot Levine styled for Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge! The kitchen’s Eames chairs — $20 each — were plucked from a Brooklyn stoop sale. A Craigslist search turned up the blue dining hutch, and Dunn found the antique cast-iron beds on eBay and at a local yard sale.

«I wanted a basic white palette with a few hints of color — blues, pinks, lavenders,» says Dunn of her unfussy design style. «We stayed away from anything dark or fancy, and tried to keep everything simple. We wanted the place to look very much like a farmhouse, just with a modern twist,» Dunn adds.

Max shows how it works in his room, where an old-fashioned wrought-iron bed and cherry-sprigged curtains mingle with a contemporary sheepskin rug and a whimsical mushroom step stool.

Just as the family was getting settled in their newly renovated home, Dunn discovered she was pregnant with their second child, Sadie, who was born last year. Max, who likes playing big brother, calls their new home «the white house,» which, Dunn jokes, makes it «sound like the one where Barack Obama lives.» While 850 square feet, however well restored, can’t compete with the White House in scale or grandeur, the homes were built in the same decade and have an equal claim to the American tradition.

Last winter, Levine introduced his son to the ritual of sugaring-off maple trees. «Max and I tapped 15 of our trees, gathered the sap, and boiled it into syrup.» And this summer, Sadie sat in a bouncy chair on the lawn as her parents and brother gardened and Winnie, the family dog, chased squirrels.

Whenever Levine has to go to New York City for a job (Dunn is taking a break from work while the kids are small), the family follows him from Columbia County to their apartment in Brooklyn. But before long, they return to the little house to garden, cook, and relax around the fire. «I grilled salmon with a maple glaze last night,» Levine says. «It was delicious,» Dunn notes. «He can teach himself how to do anything, from building a shed or sugaring to making sausage.»

As the family sits around the kitchen table, eating crusty bread and homemade soup, they reminisce about all the hard work that went into creating their old-fashioned, newfangled home. «While we didn’t expect to rebuild the whole place, I’m really glad we did,» Sacha says. «It looks like a country house. It seems now as if it were always here.» And, of course, in a way, it always was. It just needed a stylist’s touch to pull it out of the scenery and onto center stage.